Torch: a new machine learning library in C++/GPL

[Samy Bengio]

Dear connectionists people,

We would like to announce the availability of yet another
machine learning library, written in C++ under the GPL license.

This new library is named "Torch" and has been written mainly by
Ronan Collobert, also known for his widely used SVMTorch package
for SVMs. Other contributors include Samy Bengio and Johnny Mari=E9thoz.

Currently, the main features of Torch are the following:

- A lot of things in gradient-machines, that is, machines which could be
  learned with gradient descent. This includes Multi-Layered Perceptrons,
  Radial Basis Functions and Mixtures of Experts. In fact there are a lot
  of small "modules" available (Linear, Tanh, SoftMax...) that you can plug
  as you want to get what you want.
- Support Vector Machine, in classification and regression (mostly the same
  code as in SVMTorch but now integrated in the Torch library).
- A Distribution package which includes for the moment Kmeans, Gaussian
  Mixture Models (GMMs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).
- A few non-parametric models such as K-nearest-neighbors, Parzen Regression
  and Parzen Density Estimator.
- Tools to do either "train/test" experiments or K-fold cross-validation
- A lot of measurers (to print for instance the mean squared error or
  the classification error of as many datasets as wanted, during training or
  testing).
- A few typical "main.cc" examples to understand how to create your own
  experiments such as mlp.cc (train and test an MLP), gmm.cc (maximize the
  likelihood of a GMM), hmm.cc (maximize the likelihood of an HMM),
  mixture_softmax (train and test a mixture of experts).

This library is intented to provide the state-of-the-art of the best
algorithms in machine learning. Therefore, if you know C++, are working
in machine learning, and want to develop your own algorithms or use
well-known machine learning algorithms, Torch is for you!

Visit the official Torch website at http://www.torch.ch to know more
about Torch and/or download it.

Note that, of course, Torch is and will always be under development...
Note also that it was designed for Unix and Linux systems...

Have fun!


-----
Samy Bengio
Research Director. Machine Learning Group Leader.
IDIAP, CP 592, rue du Simplon 4, 1920 Martigny, Switzerland.
tel: +41 27 721 77 39, fax: +41 27 721 77 12.
mailto:bengio at idiap.ch, http://www.idiap.ch/~bengio